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It was in January four years ago that nearly 100
journalists from all over Pakistan got together to launch a new TV channel in
Lahore, Dunya TV. That was where I first met Mukarram Khan Aatif, our reporter from
Mohmand.

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New
York, January 17, 2012--Unidentified gunmen killed broadcast journalist Mukarram
Khan Aatif in a mosque north of Peshawar today, according to news reports. Aatif
was a correspondent for private TV station Dunya News and also worked for Deewa
Radio, a Pashto-language channel of the U.S. government-funded broadcaster
Voice of America, news reports said.

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Today
is the first anniversary of the killing of Geo TV broadcast reporter Wali Khan Babar
in Karachi, a case that has almost been forgotten,
particularly in the shadow of the release of the judicial
inquiry into the murder of journalist Saleem Shahzad. The
report on Shahzad has been posted on the
Ministry of Information's website.

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About six months after it was launched, the commission investigating
the murder of journalist
Saleem Shahzad submitted its report to Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani on
Tuesday. In the past, the government has not released results of such
investigations into the deaths of journalists, but there might be an exception
this time. There are early media leaks of its content: The Express Tribune's bylined story is "No
culprit named in Saleem Shahzad report," and Dawn's story ("Posted by a reporter," the byline says) is here.
Dawn echoes The Express Tribune's headline a bit further down in its
posting: "According to sources, the
commission has stopped short of fixing responsibility for the journalist`s
killing." But with no names named, the government might find it politically
viable to make the report public.

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A quick pointer to a statement issued by the Human
Rights Commission of Pakistan on Monday: It said, in part, that "The HRCP is alarmed at reports of threats
received by journalists on account of their work." The commission asked the government
to ensure that threats to journalists end and that risks associated with
practicing journalism in general are eliminated, as noted in the
English-language daily Dawn.